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alt title(s): War Of The Worlds
No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s... Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.
So begins
The War of the Worlds by
H. G. Wells, the first alien invasion story, and perhaps the best known, in which late-Victorian England, then homeland of the world's greatest empire, was conquered with casual ease by
Martians. Only chance saved them.
The story begins with the
nameless narrator, a lightly disguised
version of Wells, visiting an observatory, where he is shown explosions of the surface of Mars. Shortly afterwards, an apparent meteor lands close to the narrator's house. When he goes to look, he sees the first of the Martians emerging from its spacecraft. They swiftly set up strange machinery, incinerating all humans who approach.
The narrator sends his wife to presumed safety then returns just in time to witness
gigantic tripods,
Martian war machines, smashing their way through the massed ranks of the British Army. Three tripods are brought down in a succession of battles before the army and navy are routed, and more Martians are still landing, reinforcing the invaders.
A few are making grandiose plans for resistance, but it is clear they have no prospect of success. Great Britain has been utterly defeated. All the narrator can do is hide in the ruins near a Martian base, where he gets a first hand view of the aliens drinking human blood. It seems they intend to treat humanity as
nothing more than food.
At this point, when the full consequences of defeat have become apparent, the Martians disappear. Returning to London, the narrator finds that all the Martians have conveniently dropped dead, killed by some terrestrial microbe.
There have been several movie versions of this story, as well as the notorious
Radio Drama, a
TV series, and, of all things, a
Rock Opera. It has also influenced many subsequent alien invasion stories.
Interestingly, the novel was originally considered part of a different genre - the "Invasion Story", of which there was a spate in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, depicting fictional invasions or invasion plans of the author's home country, usually by German or Crypto-German forces. Only later did the "alien" part of "alien invasion" come to be considered more defining than the "invasion" part.
The novel is generally regarded as an allegory of colonialism, depicting Great Britain receiving the same kind of treatment as it had been delivering to the natives of its empire. (Metaphorically. Englishmen did not usually drink human blood.
Usually.)
For the television series, see
War Of The Worlds.
This novel provides examples of:
- Adaptation Decay — The motives of the Martian invaders, and the colonial allegory, are largely ignored in many adaptations.
- For some reason, the Thunder Child scene gets left out of every single film adaptation this troper has seen. One would think that would be the one scene Hollywood would want to leave in.
- Aliens And Monsters
- Author Avatar (although Wells is mentioned as a separate person: see Mythology Gag, below)
- Big Creepy Crawlies — Wells notes when introducing the Martians proper that all present expected "a man." What emerged was decidedly more Lovecraftian. Even granted the genre was an outgrowth of terrestrial varieties, future Alien Invasion stories seem to have largely missed this delightful precedent.
- Chekhovs Gun — Midway through the story, the narrator describes certain things that the humans have since learned about the Martians - among them, that they are/were vulnerable to terrestrial germs...
- Cool Plane — the 1953 movie features Stock Footage of the canceled YB-49 bomber
. If the "flying wing" design reminds you of something, you're right. The basic principle was re-used for the B-2 Spirit Stealth Bomber.
- The original novel briefly mentions a flying machine (see quote below). This was a cool plane by virtue of it pre-dating the existence of actual Real Life planes.
- Creator Provincialism — There is no mention of what happened outside south-east England. Many authors have written stories describing events that unfolded in other parts of the world - Kevin J. Anderson's War of the Worlds: Global Dispatches is a compilation of some of the best. Note that in the novel it is more or less explicitly stated that England was the only target of the Martians.
- While unquestionably provincial, it is noteworthy that even Wells considered it unlikely the Martians would stop with Britain. Not much of a spoiler, really, but the Martians built flying machines (read: airplanes before they existed), leading the lead characters to conjecture on this small vanguard being enough to themselves take over the world. To this troper, the implication was that nobody was safe.
- It's justified in that the narrator has no real source of news of the outside world, being caught up in the panic.
- Crowning Moment Of Awesome: The Thunder Child, an ironclad ship that takes out two of the Martian tripods before exploding and damaging a third.
- Standing firm between them... there lay Thunder Child!
- Crowning Music Of Awesome: Several tracks in the rock opera version, including Eve of the War, an overture which opens with the spoken prologue from the book); Forever Autumn, a Tear Jerker which contrasts the Journalist's lost love with the military defeat of humanity by the Martians, featuring Justin Hayward of the Moody Blues singing, which scraped the Top 40 charts; and Thunder Child, which describes the scene mentioned above.
- Deadline News: the radio drama, combined with Kill Em All. Even the narrator goes down.
- Death Ray — The Martian "Heat Ray".
- Earth Is A Battlefield — Especially adaptations that make it clear the aliens are attacking everywhere.
- Earth Shattering Poster
- Easily Thwarted Alien Invasion
- First Contact
- Foreshadowing — The red weed dies off not long before the Martians do.
- Forgotten Trope — War of the Worlds was actually a Science Fiction twist on the then-vibrant genre of the "Invasion Story".
- Fridge Logic: There were 10 landings, up to 3 tripods each. Just the battles the narrator saw accounted for three kills and one damaged. The martians would have no chance in the long term without reinforcements that never came, fighting on a much wider front against a now-prepared enemy. Earth would still be devastated, though. Most adaptations increase their numbers and make them completely invincible, removing this problem ant the issues raised by advances in human weapons.
- Or as the up coming animation sequel implies, the invason was just the frist wave (they had to delay the second wave in order to make the tripods germ-proof)
- Keep in mind too that the armies of the time had no defense against poison gas and aircraft.
Something rushed up into the sky out of the greyness — rushed slantingly upward and very swiftly into the luminous clearness above the clouds in the western sky; something flat and broad, and very large, that swept round in a vast curve, grew smaller, sank slowly, and vanished again into the grey mystery of the night. And as it flew it rained down darkness upon the land.
- Ghost City
- High Octane Nightmare Fuel: The Radio Drama caused mass hysteria from people who believed that it was real.
- Interestingly, it did not. Such reports were invented by the radio channel and its associates. As an essay on the topic puts it, "We are very susceptible to the notion that other people are more easily persuaded than ourselves."
- Humongous Mecha — The towering Martian tripods are one of the first appearances of this in fiction, if not THE first appearance.
- That depends on whether you count Hindu mythology as "fiction".
- Mythology Gag — During the sequence where the narrator is watching the Martians from the ruins, he comments that they remind him of an essay he once read about how humans might evolve in a technology-dominated future, by some chap whose name he can't quite remember. The essay actually existed, and was used by Wells as the basis for the Martians' biology; its author was Wells himself.
- No Name Given — for the movie, he was given the name of "Dr Clayton Forrester" (Yes, that's where it came from).
- Not So Invincible After All — After shrugging off (nearly) everything humans can throw at them, the aliens die of some minor Earth disease their immune systems weren't familiar with.
- Plant Aliens — The red weed grown (or at least imported) by the Martians.
- Rock Opera — Jeff Wayne's The War Of The Worlds
- Science Marches On — The book is based on two scientific theories popular at the time, both since discredited:
- Firstly, and most obviously, that Mars has "canals", artificial waterways, visible from Earth. This suggests a vast and advanced civilization. Apparently this all came about when an Italian astronomer saw what he called "canale" - "Channels", meaning natural rock formations that looked like rivers. The English press then got the translation wrong.
- Secondly, that the digestive system actually converts food into blood for the circulatory system. This explains why the Martians feed in the way they do - bypassing the mouth to mainline blood straight into their own system.
- Also, the idea of the invaders being wiped out by terrestrial diseases has been shown to be fairly unlikely. It would be outright impossible for a virus, since viruses have a difficult enough time jumping between terrestrial species, let alone aliens. Pathogenic bacteria of some sort are within the realm of possibility, but still unlikely, considering that an civilization as advanced as the Martians should be able to prevent such an outbreak from getting so bad.
- As this troper recalls, the novel specifies the Martians fell primarily to rotting. Having no tolerance to or familiarity with even the most basic of bacteria, they were literally decaying the moment they landed. While this proactively, accidentally addressed the matter of viruses being unlikely to find a foothold, it is a good assumption that any alien body will simply prove a hostile environment.
- The novel does say that the Martians fell victim to necrotizing bacteria, and suggests that they had eliminated Martian diseases so long ago that their immune systems had atrophied to nothing. Wells might've historically dodged a bullet concerning viral diseases: viruses, as they're understood today, had barely been discovered when the book was written, so the original book only talks about bacteria being responsible for the death of the Martians (which just happens to be more biologically likely than the movie's update to viruses anyway).
- Also, see The Theme Park Version below.
- Spiritual Successor — The Tripod series, a series of young-adult novels by John Christopher, is in all but name a sequel set in an Alternate Continuity where the Martians were successful in dominating the world.
- The Theme Park Version — In the novel, humans manage a few isolated successes against individual Martian tripods, and there are mentions of damaged tripods. By the 1938 radio play, we are explicitly told that the Martians lose only one machine. By the 1953 film, the war machines are totally indestructible, and even an atomic bomb fails to put so much as a scratch on them. Arguably this an unavoidable part of technology lag - in 1898 the most powerful weapons around were the big guns of the Royal Navy, the difference between such a weapon and a field artillery piece being one of scale. Conversely by 1953 atomic weapons are orders of magnitude more powerful than conventional explosives: the limited effectiveness of certain weapons of the earlier adaptations becomes impossible. Either the Martians are, however marginally, at risk from conventional attacks or they are utterly immune.
- Before making the 1953 movie, George Pal visited several military bases, described the Martian war machines to soldiers and officers, and asked them how the modern United States army would fare against them. The verdict was that the Martians as presented in Wells' novel would be utterly crushed. He wisely decided to give them an upgrade.
- This was further proved by how easily the Spielberg Martians are beaten once they become too sick to operate their machinery properly. One tripod is easily taken down by a small group of infantry (albeit ones with advanced missiles).
- Which is itself pretty similar to an early scene in the novel, where a group of artillery crews manage to take down a tripod by concentrating fire on one leg until it topples over. Their victory is made somewhat moot when the other tripods in the formation vaporize them all seconds later.
- Tripod Terror — The Trope Maker.
